geospatial available here!

In the recently released KFS report of 2021 – the– Kenya has a tree cover of 7,180,600.66ha, which is 12.13% of the total area. Based on the national ambition to reach 10% tree cover by 2022, this is a monumental achievement. Forest cover, on the other hand, has a coverage of 5, 226, 197.79ha, a paltry 8.83% of the total area. Tree cover and forest cover are two terms that are sometimes used synonymously. However, they are different. Forest cover,  geospatial as per the KFS report, refers to the amount of land area covered by a forest. Its counterpart terminology – tree cover, is a lit bit vaguer. There has been a widespread assumption that each country should have a minimum of 10% forest cover, supposedly from an unconfirmed UN statement. An online search shows there has been, and still continues to be a debate on this threshold. This assumption arose from the definition of a ‘forest’ itself, in which, inter alia the ground under it must be under 15% or more canopy cover. A scholarly debate on this matter revealed it is better for countries to This is because each country has differing climate regimes, land availability and vegetation biomes. Scholarly debates aside, we will try to corroborate, or rather, see if we can verify the findings of the KFS 2021 report on nothing else but through desktop research. We already know forest coverage is 8% of the total area, so we will check out if our remote sensing analysis comes close to this. If Eratosthenes of Cyrene was able to measure the circumference of the earth with reasonable accuracy with nothing more than mere trigonometry, surely we –2000 years down the line can do better armed with the latest software and tech. Can’t we? To stop beating around the bush, we will use GEE, Qgis and Excel to calculate the forest coverage in the country. Let’s see if it comes close to the 8.83% mentioned in the report.